From behind her, she heard squabbling: the hellions she’d accompanied aboard, arguing vehemently with the corsair reavers they were fraternising with. Each minute Monika had spent among the hellions had been both elation and torment in one. If the squabbling killers realised her deception, they would torture her to death before even considering the consequences of destroying the Ilarch’s favourite pet. Monika didn’t care; an agonising death was preferable to the ceaseless anguish of being Kelaene’s plaything. Her captor had allowed her to attempt an escape several times before, but each time had revealed the opportunity to be nothing more than a trap to taunt her. Never before had she gotten so far, however, nor dared so much. This deep in the bowels of a corsair ship, she was beyond Kelaene’s power. If she was discovered now, at least her death at the hands of the corsairs would be swift.
Monika heard the corsairs before she saw them. The hallway made a sharp curve, and there they were: two reavers clad in the bright orange armour of the corsair forces. They stood guard before a door that, by Monika’s guess, had to be their secondary cargo bay. If there were captured enemy ships, that’s where they would be. Fortunately for her, it seemed that aeldari troops were lacking in any sort of discipline outside of the craftworlds. The two guards were bickering with themselves over a small cache of intoxicants they’d purchased, won or stolen from their drukhari guests.
Monika didn’t give them time to formulate an opinion of her. As she passed the guards, she shot the closest one in the back. The hissing splinter pistol discharged a cluster of needles into her victim, who arched his back and collapsed, the poison flooding his system so quickly that it paralysed his lungs before he could even scream. Before he had hit the ground, shaking and foaming at the mouth, she lunged over his collapsing body to stab the other guard with her wychblade. He started to yell, but her blood was up. Two years of drukhari captivity had honed her reflexes to their peak, and her arm moved like lightning, slamming the slim blade into the reaver’s throat, cutting his cry of alarm short. He tried to grab for a weapon, but she bore him to the ground, stabbing him over and over.
If anyone had heard the noise, she would be discovered in moments. She emptied the small satchel of drugs into her pockets. She tucked the splinter pistol into the combat webbing of her stolen gear, but left the wychblade protruding from the dead reaver. If anyone found the corpses, let them assume they’d died in a fight with a visiting hellion over stolen drugs.
Monika spun and hit the rune on the bay door. It hissed open, revealing a cargo bay stacked with materiel. Her intuition had been correct: half a dozen escape pods littered the spoils, along with an Aquila lander. Only a single obstacle remained between her and salvation: a mob of aeldari, mixed between the drukhari and corsair crew. At the head stood the twin forms of the Ilarch and the corsair baron. As Monika reeled, the assembled crews burst into laughter.
‘You may remove your ludicrous disguise whenever you wish, mon-keigh,’ Kelaene said. ‘Your stolen apparel will need to be burned, I think. My hellions have been complaining of your stench since our wager began, so I doubt anyone will wear it again.’ The Ilarch smiled suddenly, as if cruel inspiration had struck her. ‘However, as reward for your success, I’ll permit you to keep those wicked teeth you’ve fashioned for yourself.’
The aeldari laughed all the harder. Monika stumbled away, their laughter echoing behind her. She ran, looking for a place to hide, but knew it was futile. The Ilarch would always find her.
A low metallic squeal woke her. Monika opened her eyes, her heart pounding. The crisscrossed springs of her bed stared back at her. Something was wrong. She listened intently, and a moment later was rewarded with the sound of the window above her bed slowly being opened.
Monika moved her arm slowly and silently, over to the loose spring. It had taken her days to work it loose with no tools, and still more time to straighten a third of its length and grind the tip of the straight portion to a crude point. The bed groaned as a weight pushed on it from above. Monika smiled. No matter how horrible the prediction, there was, at least, small comfort in knowing that you were right. The agents of the Ilarch had finally come for her. Monika pulled her arm tight to her chest, and waited for her moment as the intruder shifted their weight again, making the springs above her shift and pop.
When a pale face finally peered beneath the bed, Monika struck, driving her shiv into the enemy’s eye socket. She wrenched her body to the side, hurling herself out into the cell as the would-be assassin howled. Monika leaped to her feet and ran to the door. Before she could throw it open, a pair of pale hands grabbed her shoulders and yanked her back.
Monika threw her head backwards, and the wet crack of a breaking nose told her that the pain blossoming on the back of her skull was nothing compared to her attacker’s. She stamped on their instep and turned, wrenching her arms loose.
The intruder was slight, his one remaining eye the fathomless black of the drukhari. He wore no uniform or insignia, but his feet and arms were bare, a sure sign of either a wych or a hellion. His features were delicate but drawn, in the feral manner of a drukhari gone too long without inflicting suffering. He reached for her, her shiv still protruding from his face. Monika hissed and yanked the weapon from her assailant’s ruined eye. With a ragged scream, she buried it in his abdomen over and over, in a flurry of vicious strikes. The drukhari grasped his bleeding gut and staggered away and the moment he disengaged, Monika bolted.
Stone halls were much quieter than corsair ships. Monika fled through the halls of the abbey as silent as a shadow, running on the balls of her feet to reduce her noise nearly entirely. She crouched as she scurried, keeping to the corners and the darkness; she couldn’t be certain how many of the Ilarch’s servants were after her, or, more worryingly, how many of the abbey’s staff were secretly working for the drukhari. The wing of the old abbey that had been given over to guest quarters was close, though. That’s where she would find Deidara.
‘Do you think you’ve learned everything she knows?’
Sister Amalia’s voice brought Monika up short. She pressed herself against the wall outside the inquisitor’s quarters. That an agent of the Imperium as exalted as Amalia could betray her Order for the drukhari was almost unthinkable, but Monika’s paranoia was just deep enough to encompass the notion, and so she listened intently to Amalia’s conversation rather than burst in.
‘Not by half.’ Inquisitor Deidara’s voice was tinged with scorn. ‘She spent a decade in the clutches of the drukhari. The intelligence she’s gathered has already proven valuable, and likely will continue to do so.’
‘But you worry it takes too long?’
‘No,’ said Deidara. ‘Monika withstood her trials with more resilience than most would have, and I’m willing to leave her to her well-earned rest, taking anything she might provide for me as a service beyond what was required of her. Some within the Ordo Xenos disagree, however. The raids in the sector grow bolder each year, and there are some who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to find a weakness among the drukhari, even if it meant putting Monika to the question with the harshest of measures.’
Satisfied that neither of the women were conspiring against her, Monika rolled around the corner. Deidara and Amalia, sitting on the bed and a stool respectively, leaped to their feet. Monika held her hands up, the blood on them dragging sharp focus from their shock.
‘Drukhari,’ she said. ‘Trying to abduct me. The Ilarch wants her pet back.’
‘The Ilarch is dead,’ said Sister Amalia. ‘You slew her yourself.’
‘The Marauder lives,’ said Monika. She held her hands aloft. ‘Do you need further proof?’
Amalia started to respond, but Deidara cut her off. ‘Let us see this intruder,’ she said. The inquisitor put up a hand to stave off Amalia’s protests. ‘Blood doesn’t come from nowhere, Sister Amalia.’
The three of them returned to the cell.
It was empty.
‘He was here!’ Monika protested. She gestured to the bed. ‘He came in through the window, and tried to attack me!’
There was no trace of the attacker. Not only was there no corpse, there was no blood either. Only Monika’s sharpened bed spring, its metallic point coated with nothing more than a faint patina of rust. The window was closed; securely locked from the outside.
The world spun rapidly out of control. Monika argued, insistently. Amalia denied, forcefully. Deidara tried to calm her friend, to ask reasonable questions, but Monika knew the truth: Rozia’s death was no accident, and this proved it. The Marauder was coming for her. The worst part was seeing the dwindling trust in Deidara’s face. The less she was believed, the angrier she grew. The orderlies had to be called. It took three of them, plus Amalia and Deidara, to hold her down and administer the injection. She bucked and twisted as Deidara whispered in her ear, swearing to get to the bottom of whatever was happening to her, but it was too late for Monika to respond: darkness rushed up to pull her down.
The darkness of toxic clouds parted to reveal the sprawling urban hellscape beneath them. The Ilarch’s raiders knifed through the twisting streets below them, gleefully gunning down the panicking civilians. Lines of Astra Militarum troops blocked the thoroughfares only to see wyches vault over their heads, carving their ranks into sprays of blood and gobbets of quivering meat. Many of the manufactoria were in flames, their safety mechanisms disabled and running amok. Roiling chem-smoke turned the sky black, punctuated by the explosions of missiles being traded between Razorwing jets and the scattered remnants of the planet’s aerial defenders.
The lead raider rushed towards the ground. Monika knelt beside her master, a slender chain running from her neck to the hook on the Marauder’s belt. The archon’s oily black armour glistened with fresh oils that Monika had applied herself at spearpoint. Her hair had been shaved to the scalp on the left side, and hung long and straight to the right, dyed a pale, ethereal blue.
‘Is it not glorious, my pet?’ The Ilarch smiled as she gazed out over the devastation. She no longer bothered to speak Gothic to her slave. Years of exposure had taught Monika to understand the buzzing drukhari tongue. ‘Like good little rodents, your people scurry for the densest brush they can find, heedless of the fact that their cowering retreat only draws them together so they can all be taken in a single stroke.’
Monika scowled. Amid the wreckage of the shanty-town they approached, once home to thousands of the workers that toiled daily in the vast manufactoria, her experienced eye picked out the hidden aerials and gun emplacements of a concealed command position. So did Kelaene’s.
‘Shall we play the game, mon-keigh?’
Monika rose to her bare, filthy feet. Her clothes had long since been reduced to rags, and her flesh was marked by uncountable scars. Every indignity that could be imagined had been heaped upon her, but behind her eyes boiled enough rage to play the Marauder’s game still one more time. Always one more time. Before each final attack, the Ilarch’s bravado compelled her to wager her entire empire on a fool’s gamble. The drukhari would hand a lethal weapon over to her slave, giving her a chance to strike her master down and be free.
If she failed, she would be beaten severely. After the raid her flesh would be carved to ribbons and her body suspended from razored hooks. Monika had lost count of the number of times she’d lost. She saw the arrogance in the Ilarch’s eyes, and felt again the temptation to refuse. If she stayed down, proved that she had finally and truly been broken, she knew the Ilarch would tire of her and, finally, let her die. Still, she rose, meeting the drukhari’s contemptuous gaze with all the fury she could muster.
The Marauder smiled, unbuckled the holster at her side, and tossed her pistol to the slave in a graceful arc. Monika grasped the weapon, staring down at the gun in her trembling hands. She’d been handed a live pistol before only to discover it wouldn’t fire when she tried to turn it on her mistress. Drukhari weapons didn’t feature a safety, but Monika checked that the power core was active before turning her gaze back to the Marauder, who unhooked Monika’s thin chain from her belt and let it fall to the deck.
‘Well?’ her mistress taunted. Behind her, the flags of the command centre were whipping by. The raider crew were leaning over the barbed rails of the raider, yelling in glee as their splinter rifles tore through its defenders. Monika didn’t know what form her humiliation would take, but she had played the game long enough to know its general shape: her shot deflected by some kind of force-field, or intercepted by an underling shoved into her line of fire by a chuckling bodyguard. Kelaene never played games that weren’t rigged in her favour. She won not because she was inherently superior, but because she only picked foes who couldn’t defeat her. It might have taken her years, but Monika had finally learned the truth of that lesson.
Monika turned, aimed at the pilot of the raider, and pulled the trigger. The pilot’s face was a mask of shock as the darklight beam slashed through both his chest and the command strut he stood behind. Its only method of steering destroyed, the raider lurched starboard with a sharp, whining cry. Monika just had time to turn, to see the Marauder howling with laughter, before the raider slammed to the ground.
Along with the kabalites, Monika was hurled from the deck by the impact. She tried to tuck and roll as she hit the ground, but she heard a dry snap, and felt her arm go numb to the fingers. Her left hip was in agony, the leg twisted in an unnatural way from the knee down. The broken form of the raider tumbled through the lines of infantry and exploded, sending a rain of thin, twisted metal down on her and anyone fortunate enough to have escaped the blast zone.
The Guardsmen were already rallying, veterans lunging forward to bayonet the drukhari survivors lying on the battlefield. Monika let her head sink to the ground. One of the Guardsmen was trying to speak to her, but she could barely understand him. It had been so long since she’d heard Gothic spoken aloud. Compared to the drukhari she’d been surrounded by, he sounded like a man speaking through a mouthful of potatoes.
